Charles Budd..Home Strip on Brick

I’m currently painting the exterior of a customer’s house. Most of the brick is unpainted, except a couple of square metres where there was a lean-to in the past. I asked my customer whether he’d like me to strip the paint off, to even it all up. He said it was a good idea.

There were several layers of gloss paint on the brick – and I knew to sand it all off would take a long time, as well as quite a lot of Abranet (the mesh sanding ‘paper’ I use which enables most of the dust produced by sanding to be sucked away). I decided to strip the paint using Homestrip non-toxic paint stripper and do a side-by-side ‘before and after’ comparison on either side of a big black electricity mains cable.

I brushed on one thick layer of Homestrip, covered it in plastic film and left it overnight. It looked like this in the morning:

I spent a few minutes scraping off most of the paint. Some was still stuck to the brick, so I brushed on another layer of Homestrip and covered it with the same plastic. The next morning I spent 10 minutes scraping the softened paint off the brick, and another 10 minutes sanding a few last bits off. Then I took this photo:

Although Homestrip takes longer to work than paint strippers with harsh chemicals in, I much prefer using it. It’s non-toxic, has a faint fruity odour, and it works beautifully. My customer said he’d spent hours stripping another area (you can just see it on the right of the first photograph), and the results were nowhere near as good. He’s as pleased as I am with the result.